Bloody Mary’s Birthday
Legend has it the world’s first Bloody Mary was shaken precisely 75 years ago, on October 5, 1934—just five years after the invention of canned tomato juice—at the King Cole Bar in the St. Regis, the now-100-year-old beaux arts hotel founded by John Jacob Astor at the eminently exclusive corner of Fifth Avenue and 55th Street.
Back then the bar served a worldly mix of socialites, including Serge Obolensky, vice chairman of the board of Hilton Hotels and a Russian native with a penchant for vodka. Obolensky asked barkeep Fernand Petiot, who’d also tended a hotel bar in Paris, to re-create the vodka and tomato juice cocktail Obolensky had recently swilled in that city, and Mary—complete with salt, pepper, lemon and Worcestershire sauce and named for the Catholic English queen who had killed so many Protestants—was born.
Or not. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America notes that, as with so many similarly celebrated elixirs, historians dispute the details of the drink’s creation myth. Some say Petiot first paired vodka and tomato juice back in France, or that he called the drink after a lover. Whatever its origins, the name was deemed rather churlish for polite society, so for a time the St. Regis rechristened her the Red Snapper.
The cocktail has long since regained her name—and traded exclusivity for ubiquity. These days the mix of tomato juice and vodka—spiked with a dash or three of lemon juice, Worcestershire and cayenne—is poured at every city space with a liquor license and a brunch menu. Day-shift bartenders still riff on Petiot’s original formula and this October you can taste variations from Charlie Palmer, Alain Ducasse, WD-50, the Spotted Pig, mixologist Dale DeGroff, the John Dory, Tabla, Freeman’s and the 21 Club, all at the St. Regis, with proceeds going to charity. Here’s hoping we’ll find a glass containing the life’s blood of late-summer tomatoes, freshly grated horseradish, a double garnish of pickled Smokra, a prosciutto-stuffed caper berry and a lovage straw for sipping.
The St. Regis King Cole Bar, 2 East 55th Street at Fifth Avenue; 212.753.4500
The Way We Were
It seems impossible now to think that the government would ever pay a poet to investigate Waldorf salad, but in the early 1930s the feds’ own Works Progress Administration Federal Writers’ Project predated the stimulus package. One cutting-edge administrator named Katherine Kellock hired out-of-work poets, writers and reporters to create regional travel guides, including one master catalog of what our countrymen—or women, more likely—cooked.
Kellock hoped to edit America Eats into a five-part regional compendium of foods of the then-48 states—still innocent of freeways, corporate chains and TV dinners. But, when the war came, writers like Nelson Algren and Richard Wright dropped out for better work and a byline, and the pieces of the project (most typed by hand on the silky paper called onionskin) were packed away unedited or, worse, lost to the file cabinets of time
Until Mark Kurlansky—voracious author behind Cod: Biography of the Fish that Changed the World and Salt: A World History, discovered the trove of treatises while researching a food-writing anthology. His new book, The Food of a Younger Land, culls the most interesting repast reports, many chronicling the eats of our very city, including “The New York Literary Tea,” “The Drugstore Lunch,” “The Automat” and “Dishes New York City’s Hotels Gave America” (that Waldorf salad). The uncovered decoder to “New York Soda-Luncheonette Slang and Jargon” made us want to fire up the time machine. Here are a few:
• I.R.T.: Lettuce and tomato sandwich
• Taxi Straight (aka “Hug One”): Orange juice
• Taxi One: Orangeade
• Jersey Cocktail (aka “Baby”): Glass of milk
• Southern Swine: Virginia ham
• Hebrew Enemies: Pork chops
• Burn the British: Toasted English muffins
• Blue Heaven: Bromo-Seltzer
• Jack Benny in the Red: Strawberry Jell-O
• 14½: A beautiful girl, a little on the plump side
Beer Here
It’s probably appropriate that NY Craft Beer Week—which runs September 11 through 20 and includes Per Se’s first-ever beer pairing dinner—got its start with a burst of manly pride.
Two years ago founder Josh Schaffner and a college friend from Canada—both lovers of painstakingly crafted, intensely flavored beers and the bars that pour them—met up in Philadelphia for the City of Brotherly Love’s own annual week lauding savvy suds. But after too many taunts about his hometown’s inferiority—specifically to the Big Apple’s lack of a similarly city-sanctioned brouhaha— the Inwood native got to thinking: Why doesn’t New York have a week dedicated to great brew?
So he took that same friend to favorite Manhattan bars and hit up owners on the idea. They liked what they heard, and Schaffner— a well-spoken, outgoing type—started plotting. In just seven months, the first-ever Craft Beer Week was born. Last year’s inaugural event featured Brooklyn’s Sixpoint Craft Ales as a sponsor, a tasting at South Street Seaport, self-guided walking tours to great beer bars, a few sudsy pairing dinners and a week’s worth of deals at 52 bars citywide.
Not a bad showing for a lager-loving lad who is just 25. He might be a young drinker, but Schaffner got his first taste of good beer earlier on than most of us: He went to college at McGill in Montreal, where the beer is good, the farmers market is fantastic and the drinking age is 18. A constant traveler, he’s always sought out regional eats, but says the strip-malling of our continent often got in the way. “It was really hard to find that food, but with a little work it was always possible to find a good beer.”
Now it’s even easier for New Yorkers, at least during the third week of September. This year’s Beer Week boasts several improvements over 2008: For starters, there are four local beer-pairing dinners coproduced with the Zagat Survey, at Resto (with New York’s Brewery Ommegang), Tabla (with Chicago’s Goose Island Beer), Mas (with Sam Adams) and, yes, Per Se (where Brooklyn Brewery’s celebrated brewmaster Garrett Oliver will preside).
Schaffner has also created a $35 “passport” that allows holders to drink $2 pints of craft beer at 83 bars throughout the five boroughs. And, on September 20, it all comes to a foamy head with a cask-ale fest at the massive Queens beer garden called Studio Square, featuring 40 rare or hard-to-find beers, which will be sold in sample sizes to make multiple tastings affordable (and possible, for those who don’t possess his tolerance).
Second Annual NY Craft Beer Week, September 11–20; nycbeerweek.com
What to Feed Your Little Sw eetie
Two of Manhattan’s most famous foodies recently published books called “What to Eat.” But Nina Planck’s Real Food: What to Eat and Why and Marion Nestle’s What to Eat: An Aisle-by-Aisle Guide to Savvy Food Choices and Good Eating could hardly have been more different. Planck prescribes a diet rich in animal fats while nutritionist Nestle eschews them, counting calories.
Last year these two women’s stars crossed again when each published a book on what to feed the beloved little live being on your lap: Planck on food for babies (of which she has three), Nestle on food for pets (of which she has none). Each is a fascinating read, whether or not you’ve got a 20-pound companion in your care.
Nestle’s Pet Food Politics surprises in two ways. One is that an account of the massive 2007 recall of melamine-tainted pet food could make such a gripping read (which it does, thanks to her sharp wit and even sharper eye for hypocrisy). The other is that Pet Food Politics is really about globalization’s implications for the human food supply. Echoing her eminently important classic Food Politics, Nestle reveals how easily these toxins made their way into our own food, sold as salvage to pig and chicken farms with the government’s blessing. The subtitle, after all, is “The Chihuahua in the Coal Mine.”
Planck’s Real Food for Mother and Baby: The Fertility Diet, Eating for Two, and Baby’s First Foods also wittily skewers the modern industrialized diet—for babies and expectant and nursing moms. And while her ideas are unconventional and even provocative (she swilled raw milk throughout pregnancy, claims swollen moms-to-be need more steak and that best baby foods include salmon roe and raw meat), her indictment of formula is impassioned and airtight. We simply love her chapter-long definition of real food (in a nutshell it’s old and traditional, but read the book for right-on details).
Both books are rich reading for people with or without dependents. For all their differences, Planck and Nestle both argue convincingly that it’s time to collectively bite the industrial hand that feeds us.
Why the Economic Downturn Should Drive You to the Bar
Most watering holes are filled with a soundtrack of cocktails being shaken, ice cubes clinking and bottle tops popping. But in the Underground Lounge, a sous terre at West 107th Street and Broadway, that music of mixology is occasionally broken by the sound of cracking chicken bones and the sizzle of onions as they hit a hot skillet.
The Lounge is home to Recession Cooking Classes, a sporadic culinary education program run by Katy Keiffer (a
cookbook publicist) and Erica De Mane (a chef and cookbook author). Culinary missionaries, their goal is to get you cooking— even if they have to find you in a subterranean bar.
“Learn what Italians have known for centuries: It doesn’t cost a lot to eat well!” proclaims one flyer. And you will: As
reggaeton pumps through the bar’s speakers, Keiffer and De Mane show their students how to make use of a whole chicken— cheaper than the sum of its parts—from deconstructing the bird to making the sweet-and-sour Sicilian dish agro dolce, a cinnamon-spiked gift from a long-ago Arab invasion.
(“Cinnamon in savory dishes is like a revelation. It’s a Moorish flavor used in Sicilian cooking,” De Mane explained
to students in one recent class, chopping celery. “I buy herbs from the Greenmarket. If I don’t use them in a week, I dry them on the windowsill to use later.”)
The classes—which cover such topics as chicken basics, cooking with squid and De Mane’s specialty, Italian poverty food— are held once a week in a makeshift kitchenette set before a smattering of low tables where cooing couples typically mingle for the bar’s live music. (Keiffer has been living above the bar for the last 20 years. “This is my only way to deal with the bar noise,” she says. “If I have to put up with drunks at 3 a.m., I’m at least going to make use of the space on my own terms.”)
For $20, instead of a hangover Recession Cooking students get detailed cooking instructions (recipes are also posted at ericademane.com), a shopping list, a bottomless glass of wine and a meal at the end of the lesson. And learning how to fix your own home-cooked meals on the cheap will always leave you with more change in your pocket to tip your bartender.
